Posted by Will Jayne
on April 24, 2009, 4:36 pm
82.8.233.75
Hello friends,
I have been pondering something for some time and I've not come up with any answers that satisfy the question. For my degree, I wrote my dissertation on the subject of how modelmakers interpret concepts to communicate the spirit of something. In our case, most of the time the "concept" is a set of plans and some photos of a real life ship. Something I found however is that one's perception of the original concept will influence the outcome. For example, give a set of plans to a boatswain, an officer, a ship's electrician and a generally interested person and they will all produce very different models of the same ship using the same reference material (lets assume they are all of the same modelling ability.) This is down to the way we each interpret a subject, and it affects how we represent the subject in model form (who it was that pointed that out I can't remember, but thankyou if you're reading this.) As a producer, I do my best to do the reverse of this - by designing models that I hope will make a connection to anyone no matter what they're connection to the subject is.
However, the essential question remains unanswered to me; what is it that gives one model character and soul and another is cold and lifeless? What quality must a model posess to really speak to someone? I ask many collectors about their favourite models, and at first I was surprised to find that often their favourite models are not as detailed and crisp as some. However, they have character and I can see it when I look at them.
I think partly it is down to the choices made by a maker. It is a pretty well accepted fact in industrial modelmaking that if you took the USS Iowa and put it under a 1250 shrink ray it just wouldn't work very well as a model. One has to make choices of representation; does this detail conflict with this? Should I omit this detail, even if I have included smaller ones? These are a tiny fraction of the considerations (many subconcious I believe) that the maker is sensitive to.
Even now, I am wary of RP. Using RP we can get pretty darn close to the shrink ray model, but would we really want to? Is there a danger that we will lose the subjects "soul" in doing so? For me it is a raging conflict at times, I know I could go into extreme levels of detail if I wanted to, but I'm unsure if I should or not and can't seem to really decide.
For me this represents a major development process in the way I approach the design of a model, and I'd be really interested to hear your feelings both as "communicators" in the case of makers and "communicatees" in the case of collectors. I'm sure knowing what others feel - and I really think it is a case of feeling - will help my understanding of what it truly is to build a model.
Thoughts?
Will.
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